


In Too Deep

by TalysAlankil



Series: Situations prompts [8]
Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Conspiracy, Hostage Situations, Inspired by Final Fantasy XIV, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-18 02:47:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28985085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TalysAlankil/pseuds/TalysAlankil
Summary: Lea is a worker at one of the Empire's magitek production facilities. A boring, uneventful overseeing job watching automatons work by themselves, where Lea is wasting his time and potential…until the day one of the drones malfunctions for no apparent reason.
Relationships: Isa/Lea (Kingdom Hearts)
Series: Situations prompts [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1380823
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	In Too Deep

**Author's Note:**

> Remember when I used the game Situations to generate fic prompts? Somehow I'm still working through editing and posting those, a year and a half later.

"Careful out there tonight, Lea. Make sure the 'teks don't rise up and take over the world while you're on the job."

Lea rolled his eyes at his colleague's sarcastic tone. "You mean you didn't put in a good word for me? You're just as much of a mindless automaton as them, I thought you spoke the same language!"

Demyx scoffed, exiting the employee locker room with his middle finger raised at Lea. Demyx _loved_ to take the night shift, and didn't seem to appreciate that Lea had been reassigned to him instead of him. Probably because whoever was overseer at the imperial Magitek factory overnight had no supervision of their own to deal with, and Demyx had used that opportunity to sleep on the job more than a few times before.

Not that Lea could blame him for it. These days, Magiteks did the work more than the actual workers, building more of their kind with clockwork precision. The overseer was only there as a precaution, a human brain to deal with unforeseen problems. At least, during the day, there were other things to do: shipments incoming and outgoing to manage, quality tests to run. They sometimes even got to remote-control Magiteks on the frontlines, when emergency missions took place. It wasn't much, but it was less mind-numbing than the fully-automated night shift.

It wasn't what Lea had hoped when he had enrolled to study Magitechnology, but it was steady work. Just the thought of what he could have ended up with instead made him shudder. At one point, he'd even been considered for black ops— _black ops!_ As if Lea could even so much as picture himself going after traitors to the Empire and bringing them to justice. No, a boring overseer position was definitely more his pace.

The overseer's office was quiet and empty, the nighttime gloom barely kept at bay by dim aetheric lights running for the whole length of the walls. The surveillance monitors looked glaring by comparison, displaying a full view of the assembly line's seven areas, along with additional readings and information on the sides.

All clear. The usual. Lea couldn't help but sigh as he took his seat—relief, disappointment, or just habit, he wasn't sure. Maybe all of those.

He was fully ready for a full night of boredom, when something caught his eye on a monitor. In Assemblage #6, the power core manufacture area of the factory, stood a Magitek drone, unmoving. Lea blinked in disbelief, then, when he was sure he wasn't seeing things, waited a minute to see if the malfunction would resolve on its own, but it didn't.

"Well," Lea muttered to himself as he got up, "that's what you're being paid to do." He hadn't even had time to get fully settled yet.

He flipped a few switches on the control board, turning on the lights in the factory areas separating him from Assemblage #6, and exited his office. He reflexively closed his uniform's vest closer around him, huffing in the sudden cold: at night, the factory outside of the overseer's office wasn't fully heated to save costs, since there were no workers to suffer from the cold.

The humanoid drone was exactly where Lea had seen it on the surveillance monitor: standing still to the side of the line, a distance away from any route a working drone should have taken.

"Let's see what's wrong with you," Lea said, scanning his badge on a reader in the crook of the drone's neck to disable its movements completely, lest it try to shake off his tampering. This also unlocked the hatch on its back, revealing its status monitors.

The immediate cause of the problem was obvious: the drone's power core was malfunctioning. It registered as drained, even tough the newest generation of cores was virtually impossible to drain out. They were, after all, the very source of the Empire's might—and its most valued technological secret. Still, errors occurred, either in the cores themselves or in the surrounding equipment.

That didn't explain a total lack of movement in an area so out of the way, tough; the drone would have been programmed to call for another Magitek worker to get it to the repair area, not stand still. It took some digging to find the actual issue: the drone wasn't still, but was actually attempting to move _downwards_. Its sensors reported a power source right beneath it, and its emergency protocol had locked in on that target, overriding the normal procedure.

Problem was, as far as Lea knew, there was nothing below them. They were on the ground floor, and there was nothing under the Magitek factory. Was there?

Lea couldn't help but pull out his flashlight and shine it at the ground beneath him, as if the extra light might reveal some hidden secret. But the flooring was as smooth as it had ever been before.

Sighing, Lea put his flashlight back and turned back to the drone. He could easily disable the emergency command, add a note for the malfunctioning sensors, and let it go to repairs on its own.

He had only typed half of the commands when he heard a muffled sound behind him. Before he could look back at its source, a hand fell over his mouth, and something sharp prickled at the low of his back, applying a painful pressure through his uniform and right on his skin.

"Don't move," a voice said in his ear, cold and emotionless. "Don't do anything. And above all, don't touch that Magitek unit. Nod if you understand."

Lea froze, the threat in the voice clear even if there hadn't been a weapon pressed against his skin. He knew what his _job_ was—use the drone to trigger the alarm, and send the drone away, especially if the stranger didn't want him to. He also knew he didn't have it in him to even try defying the man. So he nodded, feeling tears escape his eyes from sheer terror.

"Good. Now, I'm going to let go of your mouth. Before I do, I'll remind you there's no one to hear you scream. So make both our lives easier, keep quiet, and you might survive through the night, okay?"

Lea wasn't sure he would have been able to find his voice even if he'd wanted to, so again, he just nodded. When the man moved his hand to type on the drone's monitor, Lea couldn't help but gasp—not that the man had choked him, but Lea felt like he couldn't breathe anyway. He was pretty sure it was just his own panic doing most of the work, though.

Part of him—the part that cared about his job—kept track of what the man was doing to the drone. He seemed intent on getting more sensor data, going through every sensory report that the drone had available.

Raising an eyebrow, Lea couldn't help but say something. "It's defective, you know," he said.

"Is it?" The man's tone remained flat, and Lea wasn't even sure it was a question.

"It's sensing something right below us, but there's nothing under the factory."

"I guess we're about to find out." The man secured his hand over Lea's shoulder. "Scan your badge to confirm, then step back."

Lea glanced at the drone's monitor. 'Power overload requested' was displayed there, waiting for manual confirmation by someone with the necessary authority. Someone like an overseer. "Whoever you are, this won't damage the factory. The Magitek forcefield will deploy, and—"

"And we'll be safe if we're just a few steps away. I don't want to blow up the whole factory. Just this section of the floor." The man paused, then, sensing Lea's hesitation, said, "Are you feeling like a hero, suddenly? I can kill you and scan your badge, if your pride can't take it."

Lea gulped, and shook his head. "No! I'll—I'll do it."

"Hurry _up_ , then."

 _There isn't much I can do to stop him_. Those were the words running through Lea's head as he scanned his badge. He had no combat training, the only fighting he'd ever done was by remote-controlling some Magitek soldiers.

Little more than a rationalization, he knew. Still, it allowed him to step back without feeling like too much of a failure. The man, he noted, kept his weapon steady against Lea's back the entire time.

Things happened exactly as Lea had anticipated: the core overloaded in a few seconds, and almost immediately, security forcefields deployed and kept the explosion limited to a restrained area.

Yet when the flames receded, there was one thing Lea didn't expect to see: a hole in the floor. Not just a hole, but a _shaft_ —the opening may have had an irregular shape due to the explosion, but beneath it, Lea could see flat, even walls, and on one side, a ladder.

"Down we go," the man said. "You first."

"You—" Lea fought the strangled feeling in his throat. "Please let me go. You don't need me anymore."

"I disagree." The prickle of metal on Lea's back became sharper, causing him to hiss in pain. "Let's go."

With a deep breath, Lea started down the ladder, forced to keep a brisk pace by the sounds of the other man climbing down right above him. Lea tried to look up, to see who his captor was, but all he could see was black leather—his boots, his clothes, all of it uniformly black—and stands of blue hair. His weapon, now strapped to his back, looked like a long staff or spear.

It was only at the bottom of the shaft, when Lea landed in a confined space with a single door in front of him, that he got a better look at the man. He was tall, just like Lea, clad all in black leather that framed a strong body. His hair, dyed a jarring, electric blue, fell in long locks on the sides of his angular face, marred with shining piercings on his lips and eyebrow ridge, and, most prominently, a cross tattooed over his forehead, centered right between his brows and descending to his cheeks. It could have looked like a faded scar, if not for its unnatural black color.

Beneath it all, it was hard to tell the man was Lea's age, but Lea knew that for a fact, just like he knew the man's identity. "You're general Saïx," he said in disbelief.

"Not anymore. I discarded the name, and I assume my rank was stripped." For the first time, the man let a sliver of emotion in his voice as his lips quirked every so slightly.

 _Isa_. People pronounced the man's actual name the way they would talk of the boogeyman. Lea couldn't get it past his own lips himself. That man had gone from a young officer near the top of the Empire's ladder, to killing the Emperor a year and a month ago, starting the current succession crisis and reigniting all of the Empire's border wars. Since then, his infamy had only grown as he struck at the heart of the Empire again, and again.

And now he was here. In Lea's factory. Blowing up a hole in the ground. "Please—just don't kill me."

"I don't intend to. As long as you don't start any trouble." He nodded towards the door behind Lea. "So let's get a move on, before anyone starts wondering why the force field was triggered and the overseer didn't report it."

Lea turned to the door, doubting his badge could open a door in this place—whatever _this place_ was. But to his surprise, he found that it wasn't locked: it gave way with only the slighted resistance, opening into a vast space, occupied by massive, egg-shaped pods made of what looked like smoked glass.

He'd frozen in awe, but Isa shoved him forwards, forcing Lea to walk ahead of him to the nearest pod—and specifically the monitor beneath it.

"So that's what it was," Isa said after skimming the readings.

Lea couldn't make sense of them himself: they reported materia production, and Lea guessed this was where the Magitek power cores' raw material was produced. But the monitor also displayed what were clearly vitals. Did those pods contain—

Before he could say anything, footsteps thundered towards them. "Freeze!" came as a command as imperial soldiers stormed the room from an entrance at the end of the room opposite from where they had entered. Isa moved with lightning speed, whipping out his weapon from behind his back. With just a flick of his wrist, the staff deployed massive blades on either sides of its shaft, and he turned the weapon just in time to catch the first volley of bullets.

Lea blinked in confusion at the sudden movement, barely registering that he had narrowly avoided being shot—all because of his captors' actions. "Hey!" he couldn't help but say. "Don't shoot! I'm a hostage here!"

"Do you think they'll care?" Isa's voice was back to its earlier coldness, yet he grabbed Lea's arm, pulling harshly and forcing Lea behind him. He slammed his weapon into the ground, and blue flames erupted from the blade, burning the next volley of bullets and fracturing the nearest pods.

Before Lea could see them fully break open, Isa turned around and took off, grabbing Lea's arm once again and dragging him back towards the shaft they had come through. It was all Lea could do to dash behind him, stopping just short of hitting the wall at the bottom of the shaft. "Start climbing," he commanded.

"They'll just shoot us down!"

With a scoff, Isa turned towards the door, and smashed the sides of the door with his weapon. The strength of the blows was enough to make the entire shaft shake, and for a moment, Lea thought they'd be buried alive; but Isa seemed to have surgical precision, as only the wall on the door's side caved, collapsing the exit.

Stunned, Lea gaped at him, earning himself a glare. "This won't hold them. Climb."

Lea stared at him for just a moment longer, before his brain resumed working. His first impulse was to resist, but before he could even attempt it, he realized it would be stupid. He'd helped Isa when imperial protocol dictated he should have done everything to fight him, even if it meant dying in the process. Trying to resist Isa now wouldn't make the soldiers any less likely to shoot him down.

So he climbed, back into the factory, and when Isa emerged from the shaft and took the lead, Lea followed him. Isa must have understood the realization Lea had come to, because he didn't even try to threaten him anymore, focusing on escape alone. They managed to get out of the premises before the soldiers formed a barricade around it, but Isa pressed Lea onwards, until they were lost in the hillsides outside of the factory, out of view and out of earshot.

Only then did it occur to Lea how utterly _fucked_ he was. "What did I do?" he said to himself. Then, turning to Isa, "What did you _do_ to me?"

Isa held his angry glare coolly. "What I had to."

"To do what, huh? Throw the Empire in even more chaos? Haven't you done enough?"

"You're right," Isa said. "I _haven't_." He averted his gaze. "I thought killing the Emperor would save us all, but it wasn't enough."

Something in his naked admission, or the regret in his tone, cut the momentum of Lea's anger. "You—what the hell is _wrong_ with you?"

Isa's eyes locked on Lea's once more. "It seems I owe you an explanation."

**Author's Note:**

> I actually have ideas to continue this fic, so by all means, do let me know if you'd like me to!
> 
> Here's the prompt for this one
> 
> I also mixed it with a story prompt that went “i just committed a crime and i need to use you as a hostage i am so sorry” (I've lost the source for it, apologies to the person who made it OTL)


End file.
